In a mobile communication system one or more mobile terminals are connecting to one or more base stations, and each base station may deploy one or more so-called “cells” for handling the mobile traffic to/from terminals. The base stations and their active cells are typically deployed at positions selected to handle a certain amount of total network load generated by traffic to/from the mobile terminals. However, in some cases, many mobile terminals are simultaneously connecting to the same cell such that the total traffic load may be too high to handle all the traffic requests from the mobile terminals. This may be caused by an unexpected high amount of terminals located in the same geographical area, and/or that the amount of data each terminal is requesting to be transmitted in a cell has increased to a level that is higher than the cells for one or more base stations can manage. Recent growth in data traffic due to the evolution of smartphones is one example of increased traffic demands creating problems with respect to total capacity in mobile communication systems.
When a network is overloaded due to high traffic demand from terminals, the users utilizing the mobile terminals can experience difficulties connecting to the cells. Typical user impact can be dropped calls, high call setup failure rates, and/or high latency in data sessions (e.g., when accessing the Internet via the mobile network).